Researchers from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) used over 10 terabytes of data from 21,400 individual exposures of the southern sky taken by the Dark Energy Camera at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile to catalog over three billion cosmic objects. The majority of the stars and dust in the Milky Way are located in the galactic plane, which is seen as a bright band across the center of the newly released Dark Energy Camera images. The Dark Energy Camera data was enhanced by integrating it with observations from other telescopes.
The Dark Energy Camera features 62 charged-coupled devices (CCDs), which record a total of 570 megapixels per snapshot.